Tank Domination Auto Rig

As Lead Animator of Q1 (Game Insight) I was responsible for supervising and participating in animation and animation-related tasks on multiple projects.

One of such projects was Tank Domination, a vehicular combat with lots of tanks.

One of the tedious tasks our modellers faces was creating and adapting a lot of tank tracks to different configurations of wheels. The technical implementation in the engine also required rigging it with joints and skinning to allow for proper dynamics and animation of tank tracks.

To address this issue I supervised and co-developed a rigging tool that streamlined this process, shaving off months off production time by automatically creating game-ready tank track models with correct UVs and rigging it all up.

Features:

• Finds all wheel objects based on their naming (we already followed a strict naming convention so this helped)
• Generates appropriate, standardized tank-track meshes based on number, positioning and size of tank wheels with clean UVs compatible with animated shader used in the game
• Tank tracks are re-generated and updated when changing settings in UI, allowing tweaking of their size, thickness and other parameters
• Generates joints for rigging
• Uses a bounding box as a guide it skins the tank, turret, wheels and tracks to the joints
• Model is ready for export into the engine
• Configurable options of each step
• Manual tweaking options